Ten years ago when my wife left me I spent about two months in the winter without heat because I was so broke I couldn't pay my electric bill. Ever since then when I get the electric bill or when I go to pay the electric bill it makes my anxiety levels increase dramatically. So, what should be done?

Should Rome Girl hide the electric bill from me and then pay it without telling me?

No. It's not her job or anyone else's job to protect me from things that will trigger me. It's my job to know something triggers me and then find ways to deal with it. Do I like paying the electric bill? No, but on Monday I did so anyway. Just like I do every two months.

And, the thing is, that's pretty much true for everything in life. No matter what you want to do or talk about someone is going to be triggered by it. That's the world - one giant motherfucking set of traps and triggers.

You could talk about nothing but My Pretty Pony and there will be someone out there who was assaulted by a Brony and goes into panic attacks every time someone mentions them. But, that doesn't mean it's your job to anticipate that it might trigger someone. It's not. It's their job to find ways to deal with the things that trigger them.

Once we start living in a world where we feel the need to put trigger warnings on things it's a really slippery slope. Eventually it would be impossible to write about anything. I can imagine a world where blog posts start out with "Trigger warnings for kittens, Mountain Dew and toenails."

It also encourages people to hide from their triggers. If Rome Girl did hide and pay the electric bill, I'd never learn how to do it myself and deal with it. If you avert your eyes from anything that may trigger you, then you are not living in the real world, you are living in some weird false cocoon. Beyond that you are asking people to do the hard work you need to do for you.

Worse still, it's setting back the rights of women and feminism by about 50 years. Do you really want to go back to a time when women had to be sheilded from the realities of life? Do you want men to justifiably be able to say "See women aren't as strong as us and we need to protect them because they can't protect themselves." Does that really seem like progress to you?